


Peter Gabriel Song Resplendent

by apiphile



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Captive, Gen, M/M, Torture, hobbling, jesus this is nasty, one character in this is batshit crazy insane, sledgehammer, somewhat ooc, why do I associate bathtubs with pain, writing to get back at erroneous terminology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-20
Updated: 2010-10-20
Packaged: 2017-10-12 19:56:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/128468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written in direct reaction to gits describing a perfectly innocuous fic as "creepy". No, you pack of gibbering jessies, *this* is creepy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Peter Gabriel Song Resplendent

It is spring when Eames enters the converted warehouse in South East London; there are catkins on the birch trees of the nearby embankment and bees are already busy with the buddleia, although he'll be damned if he ever lets on that he knows the names of these purple-dicked flowers in their railside ubiquity.

Arthur doesn't greet him for a good fifteen minutes, because Arthur is apparently insane and wants to leave Eames unattended in his nice shiny boring soulless home; Arthur is of course, Eames thinks as he pokes the egregiously expensive sound system with an intentionally greasy finger, unaware that he is, or has been, a literal thief as well as an somnatory one. So perhaps he thinks he's just letting a trusted colleague into his home. Which is almost gratifying, even if it does rather lower his opinion of the man.

It is an achingly dull, catalogue-appointed flat of the kind that yuppies get when they get old, thinks Eames, who has been in many. Miles and miles of cream carpet, exposed and polished dark wood, sleek minimalist everything, and a TV that probably never gets used for anything other than reviewing CCTV footage. Boring.

When Arthur does at last emerge from having his robot clothing machine robotically clothe him, or however it is he ends up so neatly-dressed and utterly devoid of the slightest crease, Eames has three keys in his pocket and has carefully streaked the turntable of a stupendously expensive record player with hair gel.

"Eames," says Arthur, who is militaristically refusing to use his first name until Eames gives him one which isn't a blatant lie. "You're early."

"Are you sure you're not late?" Eames asks pleasantly, hurling himself into what in someone else's home would be an armchair.

"Yes." Arthur doesn't bother to qualify this. There are rules in the universe, and one of them is that Arthur is _on time_. Eames is habitually late unless it's more annoying to be early, and occasionally he is completely absent. It's just how the social gravity works.

Eames spreads his hands; the chair has stubbornly refused to break under his weight, and he has instead hurt his back mistaking himself for a teenager, again. "I hope your cryptic email translates to _come and eat the entire contents of my fridge and then lie back while I suck you off_ ," he says, rolling his shoulder against the chair as surreptitiously as he can.

Arthur doesn't rise to the bait. "Work is work," he says, bluntly. "Follow me."

Eames heaves himself out of the chair again with a pointed sigh and follows Arthur.

"If I'm not mistaken," he says with a confused smirk when Artthur stops in front of him, "this is a bathroom. Are you sure you're not intending to turn this into what I'm sure the papers would call a 'sex romp'? Arthur?"

The bathroom door shuts behind him, and something in the overused pit of Eames's stomach sloshes warningly; something about the quality of light, perhaps, or the rate of Arthur's breathing, is not right at all. He freezes on the spot - unhelpful instinct, that one, and breaks into a smile that has very little to do with internal joy. "Arthur, darling, we are in a bathroom. Unless you're hiding something class A in the cistern do you not think a bigger room would -"

The world and its gravity part company like lunch and his stomach, and Eames trips over Arthur's extended leg, goes head-over heels into the bathtub, smacking the back of his skull hard on what feels like the metal of the bath (sounds like it too, a deep reverberant note echoing in the tiled room until his body muffles it).

He's not really expecting to see Arthur giving a playful smile when he looks up, like this is all some huge boyish prank from the pages of an Enid Blyton book - there's just something so out-of-line - and he is rewarded in his suspicion. There's no warm smile, just a polite mask and a wooden handle.

"Whatever you think you're going to do, don't," Eames says as calmly as he can, raising a hand. "I don't know what you've been told, but you know _me_. I'm not a threat. Put it down."

Arthur says, "Eames, don't patronise me. We both know you're about as threatening as a fruitbowl." He grabs Eames's foot before Eames can do anything but succumb to the cold, acidic feeling which is rising from his stomach and into his chest.

The sledgehammer cracks the tiles but only dents Eames's ankle as he jerks it away; for a second there's no pain, just numbness and weight in all his limbs - his leg feels especially far away, and something is ringing in his ears. Eames wonders vaguely if he's going to have a heart-attack.

Which is when Arthur honest-to-gods clicks his tongue in exasperation, repositions Eames's ankle against the wall - and _there_ is the shot of skin-shrivelling pain he would have expected earlier - and raises the head of the hammer again.

"We really ought to talk about this like mature grown-ups," Eames says in a faint voice. He feels like the bath is sinking under him. No, this is a bad time for memories. It is a bad time for drawing connections. "If I've annoyed you, I'm sorry. I will make it up to you. Please put that down now."

He can't quite claw himself back up through the cloying grey waters of all the things this reminds him of, all the ghosts which have settled on his heart and head and tongue, clutching his reaction times to their selfish chests and watching him drown. Arthur shakes his head as if he's confused, and swings the hammer again.

The sound of the connection reaches his ears before the agony drenches his brain, in this disconnected state. It's like being immersed in cold fire; like jumping through white light into some kind of icy black water; like jabbing on-off-on-off the switch to his brain; like having his ankle broken with a sledgehammer.

At first Eames doesn't know whether he's made a sound or not, but that comes - no scream, no yell of surprise, just a broken-sounding whine that escapes his teeth as his head falls back. "Stop, Arthur," he manages, with the nearest approximation of authority he can steal at this moment.

Arthur sits back on the toilet seat. His sleeves are rolled up, the shaft of the hammer rests against his knee, his elbows on his thighs. "It's not safe out there for you," Arthur explains, frowning. "You'll wander into a situation and get yourself shot for real."

Eames nearly greys out from pain, and for a moment he feels sick, able to see only colours and not shapes. "You just broke my fucking leg."

"Ankle," Arthur corrects.

"YOU JUST BROKE MY _ANKLE_ ," Eames shouts, and as he shouts he jerks and as he jerks his ankle sends bolts of lightning into his brain and nearly knocks him out again.

Arthur says in the tones of one explaining to someone very young - Eames feels violently sick - or very stupid, "I'm stopping you from getting yourself killed."

"I don't know if you'd noticed in the time we've been working together, Arthur," Eames says from between teeth that are clenched, for once, not against things he shouldn't say (he's had a lifetime of learning to swallow and forget those, after all), but against the surging tides of pain and blackness threatening to take him out of this conversation and leave him even more defenceless.

"-- but?"

"I am normally entirely capable of dealing with these situations myself. Until someone comes and shatters my ankle for no bloody reason."

Arthur half-rises on his toes, dips his head, and before Eames can stop him he puts his lips against the place where fractured tibia distorts his skin and - were it not for fat deposits providing a little cushion - would have pierced it; Arthur kisses the highest peak of splintered bone under its sheath of flesh, and Eames shrieks.

"In _dreams_ ," Arthur says, sitting back on the toilet as Eames clutches at his knee in a vain attempt to stem the sudden rush of secondary throbbing this little gesture has induced.

Eames chokes back bile.

"In dreams," Arthur repeats, "where you're in no real danger and a shot to the head is the reset button." He never brushes hair from his face or sweat from his brow; Eames has noticed this in their time working together, and found it amusing, assumed it was a remnant of military training, the same thing that gives him his excellent posture and stillness. He feels like a fucking idiot now for not realising.

"If I'm not in shock now I will be soon," Eames says with what feels like an eerie calm; his body is very long, and very cold. "And if this gets infected, what then?"

As soon as he's said it he realises it could be a terrible mistake. There are people in this world - ones he's met, for god's sake - who would consider someone kept safe if they were in a coffin, six feet under ground and "away from the turmoil and grind of the cruel world".

His reply is a sigh which sounds a little affronted. "I have acceptable field medical training, you know. I've told you before."

"Hospital," Eames says as firmly as he can. "I won't tell them what happened, I promise."

His eyes are almost shut, and so it's only through the bars of his eyelashes that he sees Arthur's eyes narrow and the corners of his mouth turn down. Perhaps it's the angle, perhaps it's the strangely hallucinatory feeling of being helpless and in so much pain that his clothes are swimming in sweat, but he could swear the expression is one that Arthur has learned from Cobb.

"I don't trust them," Arthur says eventually. "The point is that you stay here. Safe."

Eames breathes through his mouth, slow and shallow, and tries to unlock his own fingers from his calf before he does something terrible to the blood flow. "How ... long ... until you're satisfied ... no one is going ... to shoot me?"

"I'm not sure this is the kind of situation that has an end point."

Eames nods slowly, and rubs his eyes with the back of his hand. "Would you mind calling Ariadne?" he's careful to be polite, to keep his voice down, to keep his eyes dry and his shoulders slack. "Or let me call her?"

Arthur shakes his head.

"You can't possibly distrust Ariadne," Eames says, and he's distantly alarmed by how weak his voice sounds. He feels _stoned_ , like movements are his worst enemy, and as if he could start laughing at any minute. Fine tremors are running along his arms and through his chest.

Eames nods slowly, and rubs his eyes with the back of his hand. "Would you mind calling Ariadne?" he's careful to be polite, to keep his voice down, to keep his eyes dry and his shoulders slack. "Or let me call her?"

"I don't want to put her at risk," Arthur says, inclining his head, "and I am not dragging Dom into this, either. You know I will handle your injury on my own, and I will do a perfectly good job."

"Perhaps Yusuf then," Eames whispers. He squeezes his own thigh to assure himself that it's still there, and jerks out a bark of unexpected laughter before he can stop himself.

Arthur sniffs. "I'll get you a blanket," he says. "What good do you expect Yusuf to do in Nairobi? I'm not going to bother him when he has a conference. Stop fussing, Mr Eames."

"You broke my ankle," Eames points out, and he laughs again as his shoulders, arms, and chest all tremble in time. "I don't mean to be uncouth here, Arthur, but I am entitled to fuss when you take a sledgehammer to my bones."

When he is sure Arthur has closed the bathroom door and walked away - when he's sure Arthur isn't waiting just outside the door, when he's certain he has measured the steps correctly and they aren't faked to put him off his guard (he is shaking enough to block out easily the reasons why he knows to do this), Eames reaches clumsily into his hip pocket and pulls out his battered, scratched old Philips.

He switches it to silent with the back of his thumb knuckle. Eames hates the text message function with a passion - the buttons don't work well with his fingers, he's never been able to make his thumb work that way, and somehow in a world where communicating in brevity and ungrammatical laziness is the norm, people _still_ make fun of him for spelling like a brain-damaged child.

 _plz come 2 arthr's plc asap probs need fridly face._

Eames takes the time to add an "x" because. Because. And also, if he doesn't, she will think someone else has his phone.

He deletes the sent message from the phone's memory as soon as it indicates it has gone through, and stuffs the phone back into his pocket. His body continues to tremble, and he can't help thinking it's fucking inconvenient of it to react this way; naturally, he starts to laugh again.

The phone shakes in his pocket. Eames lies as still as he can in the bath as it shakes and shakes for long enough for him to realise it's ringing, not sending a text.

He leans on the handset until it answers, and he hears the faint static of a connected call, but no voice.

"I don't suppose you feel like apologising for _breaking my ankle_ ," he calls, as if he's addressing the remark to Arthur through the belly of the warehouse. He's no idea where in the building Arthur is, or even if he's still there at all, but there's no sense in risking a direct conversation, not when he hasn't even checked if it's Ariadne calling him.

He can't stop the shaking.

The sound of a connected call disappears, leaving Eames lying in the bath, trembling like he's having a minor fit, hot and cold with pain and drenched in sweat. His hands look grey to him; the bathroom changes size and pressure in waves.

Time gently disconnects from him, and he lies in the bath forever, for three seconds, for a day - for now, for some ill-defined future time when he is old and has stopped running away, for the carefully-maintained gaps in his memory that aren't really gaps so much as the black strips of a diligent censor. Eames twitches and freezes and bites the insides of his mouth when his ankle wrenches half-words from him, and it feels like a lifetime has passed before the bathroom door opens again.

For a moment Eames considers asking Arthur to shoot him.

He doesn't go so far as to check his totem, merely pats the pocket in which he keeps it, satisfied that this is reality, and that he can no more blast himself out of it successfully than he could when he was fifteen, and _really_ needed to.

"I could give you pain relief," Arthur says, with exacting simpleness. He's never said _painkillers_ , and Eames has often wondered why. Perhaps the inaccuracy of the violence in the name offends him.

"But you won't," Eames says. His chattering teeth distort the words.

A blanket lands on top of him, and to his diminishing shame, he flinches as the fleece touches his gently-twitching skin. Even the pressure of a brand-new (it still smells of packaging) blanket on his ankle is agony now, and only by flenching his jaw does Eames knock down another burst of humourless, involuntary laughter.

"Let me rephrase that," he mutters when he's stopped jerking about like an electrocuted worm, sweat blinding him to whatever emotion is failing to register on Arthur's pleasant mask. "What do I have to _do_ to get something to stop me from fainting?"

Eames squints through a salty screen of pain sweat as Arthur's voice comes closer; Arthur drops into a crouch beside the bath, pulls the blanket over him gently, and rests his forearms on the side of the enamel. "It would be better for us both if you lost consciousness. You'll be easier to move."

"Not so sure ... it's better for ... me ..." Eames smiles without a trace of humour, and his chest trembles from the centre. He feels exhausted, under the pain; of course, it's draining the shit out of him, and he's normally buoyed up by all the caffeine he can lay his hands on. It's something o'clock in this curiously isolated bathroom now, and it has been time since coffee made its way into his body; the caffeine he had is probably sweated into his suit, stiffening and staining it with his pain.

"Please stop being so uncooperative," Arthur says, with no indication of whether he's exasperated or merely asking for politeness' sake. Eames wonders where humour and being easily-ruffled by tiny jibes went, and if that was just Cobb bouncing off the mirrored surface of whatever Arthur really is; worse than the pain and almost as bad as what feels at the moment like impending death is knowing that he completely failed to read Arthur correctly in the first place.

"Broken ankle," Eames reminds him, breathing through nostrils which, despite being flared wildly, still don't feel wide enough. He tries to keep Arthur in focus, but his face is blurred by an expanse of taupe fleece.

"It's for your own good," Arthur says, tipping his head against his bicep. His sleeves are down again now; he must have rolled them back as soon as he finished … finished with the hammer. "All of this is for your own good."

Eames takes what he intended to a deep breath but what comes out as a series of increasingly shaky shallow ones, and he makes a move to wind the blanket around him, fails. If he's going to be stuck here for a while, he might as well make the most of what he has; old lessons that run deep even when he's not looking for them.

"I appreciate your consideration," he says, swallowing like he always has all the other, 'honest' things he could say, "and the care with which you've clearly thought about his. But _medically_ , I should – I need to be awake. That's what they say in hospitals."

Arthur doesn't move.

"I don't _think_ all nurses are unconscionable sadists, Arthur," Eames says, slowly, through a glued-up tongue and the apparently endless vibration of his cold, sweaty body. "I'll be able to go wherever it is you want to move me without you putting your back out trying to lift me." He forces down more hysterical laughter and clutches at the underside of the blanket as convulsively as if he's about to _come_.

"Oh, I can lift you," Arthur says, resting his chin on the place where his arms cross each other. "Don't worry about that."

That doesn't sound at all threatening, Eames thinks wearily. "I – can – stand up and walk there and save you the effort." He shakes under the blanket with a laugh he can't quite suppress, and his leg pulls against the fabric, strangling his brain with fresh, faint bolts. "Otherwise I will sweat on your suit."

"There are ways around that," Arthur says, watching him with what Eames suspects is a species of fondness.

"Just give me a painkiller. Please." He struggles to tell if he's being winsome or whine-some, now, and his head is beginning to feel foggy. "It doesn't have to be strong."

Arthur reaches into his breast pocket with one hand, still resting the other wrist on the edge of the bath, and Eames tries to neither groan nor flinch in the sudden expectation of a needle or a knife. But his restraint, such as it is, is rewarded with a crack of splitting blister pack, and a white oval tablet somewhere in front of his mouth.

He swallows with more gratitude than the tiny reprieve deserves, and for a moment he thinks he might honestly be okay.

There is a sound like an out-of-sorts fridge somewhere far, far away, and Arthur gets abruptly to his feet, moving with the usual grace and energy-efficient precision which bears so little resemblance to Eames's habitually melodramatic flailing (unless he is consciously wearing poised persona) it might come from another species entirely. There is focus to him that Eames has only ever copied, never created; he moves like a knife, a hunting dog.

The 'hunting dog' leaves the bathroom to answer the doorbell, and Eames lies back against the bottom of the bath. He has a few seconds to panic, now.

Sound travels better through solids. With his ear against the bathtub, and the bathtub against the bathroom wall, Eames can hear a little better what's going on outside the room: mostly the sound of pipes, mice, and the miscellany of any given building in this old city, but there is a conversation taking place somewhere too. It sounds syrupy, underwater, and he has no idea if this is the distortion of his listening post or more of the troublesome effects of shock.

Only Arthur's half of the conversation is audible – the other must be conducted in too high a voice – and it does not sound promising.

"—not here, I'm afraid."

Faint noise, nothing Eames can make out.

"—busy at the moment, you'd be very bored."

It occurs to him that, since his ankle feels a little less like concentrated murder, that the swimminess of the sound he's hearing might be related to the painkiller he's taken. He's never encountered one that works this quickly before, but it's just like bloody Arthur to have some horrendously efficient painkillers. Arthur is the spirit of efficiency.

"—must but I don't think—"

Eames really, really hopes that's Ariadne's voice he can't hear.

"—gun down."

He tugs the blanket over his head drowsily. _Gun_?

But Arthur does not repeat himself.

Content for now that he will wake up if anyone starts shooting, Eames loses consciousness.

* * *

[NOW WITH EXTRA ADDED BONUS FANaRT](http://howifall.livejournal.com/157164.html)


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